


a list of things I know about myself

by sunteaflower



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Background Relationships, IPRE Crew - Freeform, very background
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-20
Updated: 2018-02-20
Packaged: 2019-03-21 16:39:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13745022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunteaflower/pseuds/sunteaflower
Summary: Your name is Barry Bluejeans.And then he remembersA quick character study of my favorite nerd, Barold J. Bluejeans; of some of the things he forgets before remembering them again.





	a list of things I know about myself

He's sitting in a room with six other people, and it's so stupidly cold that he's got goosebumps on the backs of his hands. It's a pretty dull room, which feels wrong. He doesn't quite have the proper words to explain how such an impressive feat of science should warrant a room more interesting that beige walls and too-cold air. But they didn't hire him for his words, they hired him for his scientific achievements in necromancy. 

"Hey nerd lord, there you are! What was your name again?"

"O-oh, hey, hi. It's, uh, it-"

_Your name is Barry Bluejeans_

"Well it sure is fucking something, isn't it?" Merle says next to him. 

There's a chasm in the sky, dark and swirling and pulsing with non-life. He can feel a thrumming in his veins- a skip in his heart- and everything turns to ice with the first shift in color. It all goes gray-scale and too-bright down where he and Merle are standing. Everything goes dark and pulsing up above them. 

It's been forty-one cycles and he's still not used to how quiet it goes before the ending. If Magnus was here, maybe it wouldn't stay so quiet, but they lost him about seven months ago and they've all been a bit tempered since then.

The darkness above them fractures into a million billion points of color; a mawing darkness pierced briefly by the stars of a million billion different planes. How many of them did he witness the end of? How many more will he be forced to bear witness to? He closes his eyes as the whirling mass of the Hunger descends upon them.

He has a lot of practice with dying, and it's never been like how he was told. There's no light, just an empty expanse of nothingness; reaching on and on and on and-

_You are afraid of the dark._

It's day five of a new cycle and no one's quite shaken off how horrible the last one was. It had just been him and Davenport, in the end. He was so sure it would just be him before the reset, but Davenport had clung on: steering the Starblaster with blood pooling in his mouth and sunken eyes. He'll have nightmares about that week for however long he keeps getting re-made. It's been twenty-six cycles and this life of theirs keeps getting more impossible to cope with.

Not that he thinks he'll have to deal with this cycle for much longer. The world they're on is so indescribably hot that it's like breathing in a furnace, and he honestly thinks he might die before the month is out.

They've all been too quiet since the reset, and he knows he'll have to scrape himself together soon and get everyone back on track, or else this ship-wide depression will just continue to stretch on. It's not natural for Magnus to be so damned quiet.

That afternoon, though, they all stumble from the ship, drawn in by the obnoxious music. It's not really music, just a rhythmic pounding of rocks hitting rocks. And there's Merle, next to a bonfire on the long stretch of beach they've landed on. He's surrounded by absolutely foul-smelling food, and attempting a sad little dance while hitting rocks together.

"Come on guys! We're on a beach, and the sun's beautiful here, and the water is the perfect temperature! Stop moping, we've got some living to do!"

And he's right, the water is so perfect, and he's so glad Taako taught him how to swim a few cycles back. The food tastes horrible, but his friends are happy and he's finally not consumed by the heat, and things are finally starting to look ok-

_Your very favorite thing in the world is swimming in very cold water on a very hot day._

There's just six months until the mission starts, and they're all at Davenport's house, attempting to bond. Davenport had been cooking up some kind of pasta sauce, until Taako had scrunched up his nose in disgust and taken over.

"Here, try this-" a spoon of the creamiest, most delicious-smelling sauce is shoved into his face. He, of course, eats some. He can't really say no, not when Taako so obviously takes pride in his cooking.

He spends the rest of the night sick, and both Lup and Taako make fun of him for the next six months.

_You get ill when you drink milk or anything with milk in it._

He wakes up cold and aching a lot of nights, now, but there are some that are from old hurts. It feels sort of silly to have nightmares that aren't about whole worlds going gray-scale before exploding into darkness. To have dreams about soft sobbing and not unworldly shrieking.

He doesn't remember his father, but he does remember the years after his father. He remembers his mother being ghost-white and indescribably sad. He remembers days leading into weeks where she would barely eat. He remembers the shiver that would run down his spine whenever he thought he'd lose her next. Or the days that seemed to exist in a void, stretching on and on-

_Your- your father Gregor died when you were too young to know him._

Sometimes, though, sometimes he wakes up having forgotten, and those are the worst mornings. 

He'll wake up softly, the suns hitting his face with a pleasant warmth. He'll stretch, and think about calling his mother, and about how her birthday is coming up. He thinks about the park she loves, and how it would be nice to take her on a picnic there sometime soon.

Then the suns won't feel quite warm enough, and he'll remember that there's just one of them on this planet. And then he'll realize he's forgotten his mother's birthday- he's spent so many cycles trying to stop the apocalypse. Remembering his mother's birthday fell away a long time ago. 

He spends those mornings combing through his memories, just trying to _remember her,_ and always ends them by furiously hurling stones off the Starblaster. Usually Merle joins him, sometimes followed by Lup who takes delight in shooting them out of the sky-

_Your mother, Marleana, had soft gray hair when you were born, and was the most wonderful woman who ever lived._

He spends a lot of time with Lucretia. She's always been quiet, and he appreciates that about her.

She is also the most observant person he knows, and so he's not surprised when she casually hands him one of her journals.

It's been another tough cycle, and it's down to him, Lucretia, Davenport, and Magnus. He knows, logically, that they'll come back. The year will end and they'll come back in a shower of light. But he's still living without them _now,_ and in between being torn apart and remade, he's lived without them for a little over a decade. 

There's an ache in his chest at the thought of adding more time to that count, and the wound in his heart gets a little bigger at the knowledge that the years will continue to stack up. They're fifty-five cycles in and still don't have any idea of how to stop it.

He looks down at the journal, and starts on page one, reading about a happier time when they were all together. One of the first cycles, if he remembers correctly; the one where he and Magnus had to learn Thieves Cant in order to gain access to the Light-

_You remember them, but you have forgotten so much._

It's another morning of throwing rocks off the Starblaster. They're so high up above the world that they don't actually fall, just hit the ship's atmosphere bubble and slide sadly down. There'll be a stack of them under the ship when they finally land.

The soft crackle of their atmo bubble is soothing, though, so small blessings. 

"Do you just have a stack of those in your room, Barold?" Lup lilts from behind him, and he startles so hard that he drops his rock to the deck. "Because space on this thing is kind of at a premium, so I'm going to be pissed if I had to give up my wardrobe from the last plane in order to make room for your rocks."

Lup is standing next to him now, leaning over the railing so far he's sure she'll fall off; so of course he puts his hand on her back to steady her.

"Holy shit you nerd lord, how long have you been out here? There's like, a hundred rocks down there. Where have you been keeping them?"

He's too embarrassed to tell her he had Taako transmogrify a bunch of salt grains, so instead he throws his arm under her waist and hoists her back onto the deck.

"Next time just wake me up, you goofus, and we'll talk over some pancakes or something." She kisses him softly, and he thinks that maybe one day this will all be alright-

_And right now, in this moment, you feel a dull weight in your chest._

There's a name on the tip of his tongue, but he can't quite get it to come out. He knows it's important, that it's the most important word in the whole world. He has the momentarily insane thought that this name is the most important word in all the different planar systems. But that thought quickly becomes swept out from under him, and it's like trying to remember something you never knew. 

His body starts to shake, and he feels like he did back in grad school, when he was taking a test he didn't study for- all the concepts look familiar, but he doesn't know what they mean. There's things in his head that he can't grasp, and it's starting to make him nauseous.

He needs to remember them, they're so important. This world is going to fall apart if he can't remember-

Remember what? Remember. Taako. 

"Taako, Taako you need to kill me, I'll remember if-"

_It's the weight of a love that defined and redeemed you, but you've forgotten who that weight belongs to._

His body hits the ground, and the force of it pushes him up up up and out, and he's staring up at the sky in a form that's flickering too much for him to control. 

There's the Starblaster, above him, and he statics out for a moment- just a single moment- and he's sure this is it, this is how he loses control. And then he remembers.

He's got a lot of work ahead of him.

_Barry, I'm you just moments ago and I remember who that weight belongs to, and I can help you remember it too._


End file.
